Southerly Exposure: Cutting a riff: Rural art and human anxiety

By CLARA ROSE THORNTON – Published: November 19, 2009

Once in New York City I had a conversation with an art therapist about the nature of visual art from rural areas versus that of cities. My theory, at the time, was that art born of constant cultural clash, of societal grit, of the rage of the human spirit against concrete — that is, born of the city — often had more of a touch of dynamism and immediacy. I argued that prevailing trends in city galleries could be counted on to have continuing relevance because they inform our understanding of culture’s evolution on different levels. Even if there’s an aesthetic distaste in the eyes of the work’s spectator, the work will have the undeniability of exploration — whether the phenomenon being explored is in the artist’s head or arising from a cultural pastiche.

In contrast, rural galleries often seemed fraught with the mellow remnants of an inconsequential dream: hazy landscape paintings, sculptures of animals, and semi-functional decorative bits offered to an already-cluttered universe.

Surprisingly, the art therapist from Queens, someone whom I figured might go on about how any form of creativity has positive value, agreed with me. A theory emerged: Humans trying to understand themselves against one another and against technology and creation has inherent value, versus humans attempting to copy the natural world and not deduce or translate some aspect of experience. It raises the question of why make art if one isn’t actually creating anything new from within.

In truth, we should have felt like airheads under the spell of abstraction’s languishing 20th-century sting. Through exploring the offerings of a newly adopted rural home, it has taken some time to readjust the vision of how art emotes, how art explores, and how art theorizes about our common existence.

Yes, in the valleys of the Green Mountains there is less readily available angst and hard-edged historical cynicism in their smattering of galleries than those of the concrete jungle, where the bumping of bodies and world views replaces the skating of breeze through a silent evening. Yet the variant mindsets of artists living within and contemplating natural surroundings (cultures where tradition often holds higher value than evolution or chaos) seem to produce a sort of translation of experience that is perfectly capable of existing within — and even hovering above — art that seeks to conceptualize the intangible experiences of the mind. Because to meld the two — creation beyond human means and daily internal perceptions — is to fully approach the duality of human existence.

Take, for example, an exhibit opening this Friday at Stone Church Arts in Bellows Falls, titled “Imaginary Gardens, Village Life & the Natural World,” showcasing new works by Saxtons River husband-and-wife team Donald Saaf and Julia Zanes. Saaf explores family and village life in southern Vermont with a folk art flavor that’s tinged with dreamscape, while Zanes creates idealized gardens running amuck with surreal visions of natural land use. The opening runs 5 to 7 p.m. with wine and refreshments.

Saaf’s mixed media on panel and oil on canvas works evoke an outside world that is intricately bound with our perceptions of self — a world, which, in fact, cannot exist without these perceptions and forms a tension against them. “Cherry Tree” depicts a huge tree by the waterside, a lone man dwarfed at its base, intently rolling a mammoth cherry back to its origin. The cherry is nearly the height of the man and four times his width. Simply put, what man cultivates from the earth is bigger than him, though he offered the seed. “Garden” expands this theme. A farmer stands with a pitchfork in the lower right of a riverside mountain garden, taking a moment to admire the bustling mélange of crops; domesticated, wild and mythical animals peacefully participating; tools; children; and antiquated items of enjoyment such as a phonograph. Huge sunflowers sway, rows of broccoli and apple trees mischievously wink, and a huge, floating face looks on from a shed. The world that this farmer has created, and the figures and symbols he’s invited to participate by virtue of the undertaking, now breathe with a life capable of self-sustainment. He appears both wary and endlessly fascinated.

Then there is “Man on a Bicycle,” a warm Chagall-like wash of color and floating figuration showing a bike-riding gentleman with huge moth wings alight over a farm vista, familiar dimpled rows palpitating like waves underneath scattered country homes. Even a tamer version of Saaf’s “man in reverie amidst nature” theme, “Birch Woods,” depicts Vermont’s regal thicket of forest sticks as a sentient universe set to engulf a tiny man and dog on their evening walk. Whether the forest is benevolent and will release him is unclear.

In Zanes’ work, she imagines an underbelly to the current reality wherein inner perceptions of how we relate to the natural world and how it emotionally affects us has exploded to the surface and recoated the aesthetics of day-to-day society. Her gardens overflow with multicolored flowers that reach up and twine around bodies. Flowers, vines, vegetables and fish-filled rivers cohabitate with humans’ brick-and-mortar constructions in ways that resemble idealized versions of the currently popular “green community” mindset, where each house has large public gardens and interaction with the land and dreams trump their subjugation. In Zanes’ world, human-made objects play second fiddle to a translation of the feeling of roots beneath the feet.

Extending the weekend’s opportunity for basking in what I call the new “country cosmopolitan” aesthetic are two annual arts events also taking place in southern Vermont: Guilford Open Studio and Bennington Arts Guild Gallery Open House. On Friday from 3 to 8 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., artists and artisans from Guilford convene at Carol Schnabel Weaving Studio at 410 Green River Road to showcase the gamut of ways residents are interpreting life in their area. Featured are Nancy Detra, painter; Franklin Farms maple products; Lois Pancake, photographer; Becca Brown, potter; and Carol Schnabel, weaver. And on Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m. at Bennington Arts Guild Gallery, there will be a large selection of fine art and crafts on view amidst music, food, and the gallery’s current show, entitled “Brown” and featuring naturalist interpretations by Ann Webster-Lang, Cyndi Saint, Paula LaPorte, Judith Kniffin, and Gayle and Lars Garrison.

What this rural Vermont weekend offers in a theoretical sense reminds me of a piece in the current issue of Vogue magazine, wherein editors asked 11 contemporary abstract and figurative painters to tackle the “neglected genre” of landscape. New York City artist Julian Lethbridge recounted having much trouble with the assignment, because he felt “it was unsettling to be moving toward something explicitly, rather than having it emerge coincidentally.”

Well, I believe that Saaf, Zanes and the rest have done just that: in their supposedly cut-and-dry worlds of hills passively waiting to be rendered, they have instead cut a riff between the lines of green and let flow all of human beings’ anxieties and longing for their own existence. An impressive feat, indeed.

Clara Rose Thornton is a freelance cultural critic and arts journalist originally hailing from Chicago who now lives in an artists’ colony in Bellows Falls. She can be reached at clara@inkblotcomplex.com, or through her Web site, clararosethornton.com.